By Jennifer Chu 20 September 2017 (MIT News) – In the past 540 million years, the Earth has endured five mass extinction events, each involving processes that upended the normal cycling of carbon through the atmosphere and oceans. These globally fatal perturbations in carbon each unfolded over thousands to millions of years, and are coincident […]
By Michael T. Klare 17 September 2017 (TomDispatch) – Deployed to the Houston area to assist in Hurricane Harvey relief efforts, U.S. military forces hadn’t even completed their assignments when they were hurriedly dispatched to Florida, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands to face Irma, the fiercest hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic Ocean. […]
By Emily Atkin 14 September 2017 (New Republic) – In the days and hours before Hurricane Irma slammed into Florida, its residents were treated to copious media speculation about nightmare scenarios. This monster storm, journalists said, could bring a 15-foot storm surge, blow roofs off of buildings, and cause tens of billions of dollars in […]
By Anastasia Selby 14 September 2017 (Vox) – The mundane days all run together. But those days when I was genuinely unsure if I would make it to the end of my shift intact are the ones that stand out. I remember fighting a fire on the Angeles National Forest in 2002. Our crew flew […]
14 September 2017 (Scripps) – A new study evaluating models of future climate scenarios has led to the creation of the new risk categories “catastrophic” and “unknown” to characterize the range of threats posed by rapid global warming. Researchers propose that unknown risks imply existential threats to the survival of humanity. These categories describe two […]
By Evan Halper 6 October 2017 (The Los Angeles Times) – The Trump administration is not giving up on its effort to block Obama-era restrictions on the release of potent methane emissions at oil and gas drilling operations on public land, even after a federal judge ruled its suspension of the restrictions was illegal. The […]
By Alan Burdick 21 September 2017 (The New Yorker) – Every spring, in alpine regions around the world, one of Earth’s tiniest migrations takes place. The migrants are single-celled green algae; they are kin to seaweed, but instead of living in the sea they live in snow. (Snow weed, maybe?) They spend the winter deep […]
5 October 2017 (United Nations) – One year has passed since Hurricane Matthew made landfall in southwest Haiti – leaving terrible destruction in its wake – but children and adolescents on the island still remain highly vulnerable to the effects of natural disasters and extreme weather events, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has warned.“Hundreds […]
By Karen Weintraub 2 October 2017MOUNT DESERT ROCK, Maine (The New York Times) – From the top of the six-story lighthouse, water stretches beyond the horizon in every direction. A foghorn bleats twice at 22-second intervals, interrupting the endless chatter of herring gulls. At least twice a day, beginning shortly after dawn, researchers climb steps […]
By Alister Doyle 27 September 2017 OSLO (Reuters) – Weather extremes and air pollution from burning fossil fuels cost the United States $240 billion a year in the past decade, according to a report [pdf] on Wednesday that urged President Donald Trump to do more to combat climate change. This year is likely to be […]
